How to Optimize Images for Better Search Engine Rankings

On-page optimization and Image optimiztion are basic steps for your search engine optimization.


You are already optimizing your website for search engines,right? But I bet you aren't optimizing your images for search traffic!

You may not realize this, but images can generate a TON of traffic from image-based search engine { Google, Bing and Yahoo Image Search Engine examples}.

Image Optimization Techniques for Better Search Engine Ranking

I know, Google image search only gets a half a percent of Google’s overall traffic. But due to blended search results, images actually get a lot more traffic than that half a percent.

If you want gain this traffic in your blog and website, You must learn how to optimize your images to score some of this traffic.

Here’s how you can make your images search engine friendly:

Image Optimization Techniques

Image Optimization Technique Best-Practice #1: Alt Text

ALT is a mostly important technique to optimize images to your website. ALT stands for Alternate.

When you see a picture of a Write with Pen, you instantly recognize what’s going on in the picture.

The problem is, this instant recognition isn’t possible for search engine spiders at this time. Instead, you must help the spiders understand each of your images with alt text.

What is image alt text?

The short answer is, it’s the text that the search engine uses to understand images.

Because search engines can’t read images, you need to use alt tags to help describe your image.

To include it, you simply add alt="this is your alt text" to your image tag. Here’s an example:

<img class="wp-image-652 size-medium" title="Writing With Pen" src="http://www.happy-new-year2015.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/writing-with-pen-300x224.jpg" alt="Writing With Pen" width="300" height="224" />

The key to creating good alt tags consists of three points:

• Image needs a proper description, without keyword stuffing.
• It should be keyword rich.
• It needs to be short and to the point.

Image Optimization Technique Best-Practice #2: Long descriptions/Image Linking 

Similar to an alt tag, there is also a longdesc attribute. It was first created to help the visually impaired understand images. If you using above example - "Write with pen", you can describe this image more words like "write on paper with  ink fountain pen" . This way you can simply described your alt tag with more words.

You can explain this image with long description like fountain pen, pen color,  paper type and writing style and more, there are a lot of elements to the picture. In this case, to describe the image, you may want to include text on a page that explains in full detail what the image is all about.

Here,  you would use a longdesc, and within it, you would include the URL that explains the image in details.

<img class="wp-image-652 size-medium" title="Writing With Pen" src="http://www.happy-new-year2015.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/writing-with-pen-300x224.jpg" longdesc=”http://www.digitalhubinc.com/2014/11/Optimize-Images-Better-Search-Engine-Rankings.html”width="300" height="224" />

You can simply image interlink with hyperlink with old post and image description. In your wordpress blog/website, use this link in this way -

<a href="http://www.happy-new-year2015.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/writing-with-pen.jpg" target="_blank" rel="http://www.digitalhubinc.com/2014/11/Optimize-Images-Better-Search-Engine-Rankings.html"><img class="wp-image-652 size-medium" title="Writing With Pen" src="http://www.happy-new-year2015.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/writing-with-pen-300x224.jpg" alt="Writing With Pen" width="300" height="224" /></a>

Open Advanced Option and  put your image Title Attribute and image link in Link Rel.

Image Optimization Technique Best-Practice #3: Image File name

Image file name is most important part of seo because 50% of search images with google search engine. So file name of Image is very crucial part of search engine optimization techniques.

Before you upload your image on Wordpress or Blogger blog, pick a descriptive filename—preferably a file name you want that image to rank for—because it will help with your search engine rankings.

Many images don’t have clear titles because no proper name of image. Sometimes, whether you’ve gotten the images from a photographer or right from your camera, your image can be titled Image_64665_675765 or some other long numbered name. 

Don’t just keep the long, complex number-filled label! The easiest way to kickstart your photo SEO is to title it something relevant to what is in the image (or what is in the article).

Naming your file properly is not only easy, it is essential. Try 2-5 words for the file name and separate them by hyphen or underscore. (Separating words makes sure that search engines recognize distinct words instead of trying to understand onebigwordputtogether.)

Example - Here this below image, search the term "Taj Mahal" and show the file name "Taj Mahal in March 2004.jpg".

Image Optimization Technique Best-Practice #4: File Size Compression & Web hosting

There are two aspects to an image file size. The first is the dimensions of the image, and the second is how much storage space the image requires.

Optimize your image with adobe photoshop software, select High quality and base optimized option and save your image file. Customise image resolution with different tools and online website.

When optimizing an image, you want the dimensions to be as big as possible, yet you want the storage space to be as small as possible. Through programs like Skitch, you can adjust the dimensions, while keeping the storage size small through compression.

GZIP is a generic compressor that can be applied to any stream of bytes: under the hood it remembers some of the previously seen content and attempts to find and replace duplicate data fragments in an efficient way - for the curious, great low-level explanation of GZIP. However, in practice, GZIP performs best on text-based content, often achieving compression rates of as high as 70-90% for larger files, whereas running GZIP on assets that are already compressed via alternative algorithms (e.g. most image formats) yields little to no improvement.

All modern browsers support and automatically negotiate GZIP compression for all HTTP requests: our job is to ensure that the server is properly configured to serve the compressed resource when requested by the client.

GZIP Compression is one of the best method to improve the Page Speed of your WordPress blog,Remember Page Load time plays an important role in Search Engine results,therefore it’s always advisable to compress the content,GZIP Compression sends compressed pages from the server to browser.

You can enable GZIP Compression by using WordPress plugins but remember Plugins always consume some resources of your servers.

Benefits of GZIP Compression-

1.Increases the Page Speed,which will surely help your Readers and Visitors.

2.Decrease the Page Size which will obviously save Bandwidth.

3.Search Engines prefer to crawl and index sites of smaller size.

Image Optimization Technique Best-Practice #5: Anchor text

Just like ranking a web page, you can increase your image rankings by building links to it. The richer the link anchor text, the higher the image will typically rank.

Image Optimization Technique Best-Practice #6: EXIF

EXIF stands for exchangeable image file format, which allows you to add various types of meta data to the actual image file. In other words, it will be embedded in the image itself, so wherever it goes, the meta data goes with it.

EXIF data is even more detailed than the alt tag and long description. It carries data such as:

• Whether the flash was on or off when the picture was taken.
• With what type of camera the image was taken.
• The aperture speed that was used.
• Date and time the picture was taken.
• The image’s height and width.

The EXIF data also covers another 20 or 30 facts about the image, but I won’t bore you with them. What you need to do is consider modifying it and adding a detailed description of your image along with your website name to the data.

Image Optimization Technique Best-Practice #7: GEO locations

Last, but not least, if you are looking to rank your images for localized keywords, make sure you do all of the things above, but also add local keywords to everything

Image Optimization Technique Best-Practice #8: Image Caption

Just like Alt Text, captions matter. If Google finds an image without a descriptive file name, it may just grab surrounding copy which might make no sense in terms of the image. 

Captions help Google learn about the image, and help you direct Google on what it is learning about the image. Keep it short and sweet, and again, use your keywords!

Example - In Wordpress blog, Caption of image like that -

[caption id="attachment_652" align="aligncenter" width="300"]<a href="http://www.happy-new-year2015.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/writing-with-pen.jpg"><img class="wp-image-652 size-medium" title="Writing With Pen" src="http://www.happy-new-year2015.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/writing-with-pen-300x224.jpg" alt="Writing With Pen" width="300" height="224" /></a> Writing on Paper with Pen[/caption]

Image Optimization Technique Best-Practice #9: Choose the right images

Most importantly, choose images that are not only beautiful but that also fit in within the context of your site! Don’t put a giant image in the middle of your site just for the sake of it. 

Don’t choose images that aren’t aligned with your site aesthetic and that are too large (that might slow down your loading time). 

And, always, pay careful attention to attributing sources and photographers correctly.

Conclusion

You can apply different tactics to optimize your image , If you already use most of techniques so use some new techniques like geolocation , EXIF and GZIp Compression.

A lot of those tactics won’t have a huge impact on your image rankings on their own, but if you combine them all, you should see an increase in rankings.

In what other ways can you optimize your images?